Video Codecs, Containers, and Wrappers Explained
Submitted by mott on May 18, 2008 - 16:53
The May issue of Mac|Life provides a great explanation of digital video formats.
In short, digital video is made of "containers" or "wrappers" which contain separate video and audio file formats - which explains the problem of having a video file that seems to have no audio. The most common containers are MOV (Apple QuickTime, which can use H.264 for video and AAC or MP3 for audio), FLV (Adobe Flash), AVI (very popular Microsoft container, unfortunately, not very efficient), and WMV (Microsoft, again, which can be played using Flip4Mac and QuickTime on your Mac).
These containers can play a number of different audio and video formats.
Here's a great chart from the Mac|Life article:
My unscientific, but practical experience-generated recommendation is stick to H.264 MOV files. Properly encoded, these files can be played on almost anything with an Apple logo. For example, the Export feature of the new iMovie '08 gives a good chart showing possibilities at different sizes:
As always, the king of all Mac video conversion, VisualHub, is the way to go in virtually any situation. Just drag your video file into the window, click "Optimize for: All Devices" under the "iTunes" tab, and you'll never lose sleep over video formats again.
